


Genetic Memory

by Magichorse



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angels, Butterflies, Carlos Backstory, Carlos POV, How Carlos Arrived in Night Vale, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 21:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3304106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magichorse/pseuds/Magichorse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't even remember how I got to Night Vale in the first place." - Carlos, <i>Old Oak Doors Part B</i></p><p>Sometimes we find ourselves in places without an explanation of why we came, but we know, instinctively, that it is where we need to be.</p><p>A how-Carlos-arrived-in-Night-Vale story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genetic Memory

**Author's Note:**

> What you need to know is that monarch butterflies migrate south to Mexico to mate and die, and three successive generations make the journey back north to begin the cycle again, each picking up where the last left off. This is fascinating, and I do not know what the explanation for this is. Neither, perhaps, does Carlos.

Valeria Mejia did not actually expect to find angels in Los Angeles. 

Surely, compared to the mysterious damp of the Michoacán forests, this concrete jungle could hold no appeal. She left them all behind one day at the border, without even a second glance, when she joined hands with Rolando and walked through the desert into a world of eight lane highways. What she hadn’t expected was to miss them this much. 

It was Carlos, her second, willful child with untamed hair and dirty knees, that made her wonder if they truly had gone.

“ _Carlito_ ,” she called him in one day from the backyard when she saw him chasing a monarch butterfly, “ _Déjalo_ , come here.” 

“I was being gentle,” he said as he kicked open the screen door sullenly, “I just wanted to see it close up.”

“Leave the butterfly-herding to the angels, _mijo_ , they have places to go.”

Carlos fell silent, scowling. He didn’t like supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. It had been some years since they had exchanged harsh words over the dinner table, but she usually avoided the topic with him now. 

Some things, however, could only be explained this way. 

“Where?” He asked after a while.

“South, thousands of miles to the forests of Michoacán,” she said, going back in her memory to see them streaming in their millions through her homeland.

“Oh,” he said, and looked back outside at the butterflies on the wind and beyond at something she felt she was not seeing. “Did you ever see any there?”

“Butterflies?”

“Angels.”

“I did,” she said, “When I was your age and followed them into the mountains. But not here. This is a different place and a different time.”

She didn’t say more, because she knew she would never choose to go back to that place and time even if she had the chance, even to see the angels, and the realization had always haunted her. Instead, she dismissed him back outside to play in the afternoon sun.

A few days later he approached her.

“I did some reading,” he said, “About the butterflies.”

“And what did you learn?” she asked, forever in awe at his depthless curiosity. He looked back, expression unreadable.

“That new generations can be born with the memories of the old.”

*

Carlos has his PhD in Science.

It took him almost 15 years of grit and perseverance, but he has made it. He is a certified expert in everything from black holes to butterflies, and there seems to be a place on the map where these things collide.

He secures the funding he needs and plots a course for the deep Mojave desert, but on the eve of his departure, he stalls. He waits one day, and then another, and the days turn into weeks.

His colleagues prod him for a course of action, but he evades them, offering only excuses. He’ll call them with a hard start date soon, he promises. Soon.

Soon.

Friday of the third week, deep in the middle of a full moon night, Carlos awakens to a sound like trumpets. He throws open his window and finds legions of butterflies streaming by in the moonlight, trailing far into both horizons. 

And they are not alone. 

Alongside them, like ripples in the ghostly light, fly enormous beings held aloft on many pairs of feathered wings. He does not know what they are but he knows, like the butterflies know, that it is time to leave.

He doesn’t remember packing his car, only finds himself driving beyond the city limits and leaving the world of eight lane highways behind without a second glance. 

He drives through suburban sprawl until it thins and gives way to scrubland and sand wastes. There aren’t any street lights here, but the landscape is bright bone white and flickers with the shadows of one million butterflies and four heavenly shapes, and they lead him onward.

He thinks he must have been on the road for more hours than can exist in a single night, but the light only begins to shift toward the east as he arrives at the edge of a desert town. If he passed a welcome sign, he cannot recall the name. 

He kills the engine and continues on foot through the wide, empty streets with the butterfly tide. He finds they are coming to a shimmering rest in the town square.

The butterflies settle in the pre-dawn gloom on every surface, clothing lamp posts, benches, and trees with their winged forms. No one is awake to see it except Carlos and a lone figure seated on the lip of a quiet fountain.

Carlos, feeling whimsical, crowned with butterflies, walks through the drifting clouds of gentle insects to sit beside him. He listens as the man’s deep, smooth voice narrates the event unfolding around them into a handheld tape recorder.

“We are sometimes moved by forces outside of our understanding. How often have you found your feet have led you of their own accord to another room? Why did you do that? You did have a purpose in going there, you are sure of it.”

Carlos nods in agreement, though he knows these words are not meant for him alone.

“Should we not perhaps trust in our forgotten selves, our selves of the first room, to have had our best interests at heart, when we find we are arrived at a place we do not recall choosing to travel? Well, listeners, I know I do. And I have found myself some strange places. Let’s all wish the best of luck to our butterfly friends as they continue on their eternal journey. They will have departed before you wake, but you will continue to see their undulating shadows in your mind’s eye as you go about your business today, and it will be beautiful and emotional in equal measure.”

The man switches off the tape recorder with a click and looks out at the carpet of butterflies. Some settle in his dark hair, as they have settled over Carlos’s.

“And how about you, dear stranger?” He asks softly without turning his head, mindful of the resting monarchs. “Are you, too, departing with the dawn?”

“The butterflies have to go where they are meant to go,” Carlos answers, “And I have to go where I am meant to go.”

The angels stir and the monarchs stir with them, like leaves caught in a strong wind, departing in a river of orange and black illuminated by the rising desert sun. As they leave, a vision of misty forest canopies flashes across his vision, but he remains.

The man beside him stands up, stretches, and regards him full on for the first time with careful, hopeful eyes. _Beautiful eyes_ , Carlos thinks to himself.

“And where might that be?” He asks at last.

“Right here, it would seem,” Carlos says, and smiles at him with perfect white teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> Minor edits 2/13.


End file.
